I Decided to Try Turtle WoW Before It Shuts Down

Strictly speaking we don't know how soon it's going to happen (the server owners at least still seem to be in "we can totally do this" mode), but I did find myself thinking that if Turtle WoW does end up biting the dust in the near future... after everything that I've heard about it, I would like to at least have tried it myself, to see some of the things that people have been praising over the moon and form my own opinion.

So I downloaded a private server client for the first time in nearly a decade. (Don't give me the side eye, Blizz, my subscription is already paid up until next year.) On the plus side, with them offering the launcher right there on their own website, there was no faffing around with dodgy file sharing sites or editing realmlist.wtf files. However, it was also a reminder that a private server is still a private server with all the jank that entails, as I had to spend a fair amount of time dealing with errors and fiddling with settings until I had everything running smoothly. (In a similar vein, every single screenshot I took during my first play session was apparently lost as they wouldn't save properly unless I ran the client as administrator.)

One thing I was very impressed with though was the detailed list of server rules I had to agree to while signing up. I'm someone who likes clear rules, and I think that having some basic politeness standards for something that is supposed to be a relaxed, escapist space should not be controversial at all. Unfortunately we live in times where the argument of "free speech" is often abused to let pointless toxicity spread far and wide - when WoW players were asked to agree to a comparatively short and simple pop-up asking them to be nice a few years ago, there was a veritable uproar. So good on Turtle WoW for making it clear that good behaviour is not optional (and based on everything I've heard, they actually enforce these rules as well).

I created a blonde high elf because that seemed like a good way of diving straight into the custom content unique to the server. At first I was going to make her a paladin but then I saw that high elves get bonuses to their agility and bow skill, so I decided that I was clearly meant to create yet another hunter.

I was kind of impressed to find that the experience started with one of those fly-over introductions with a narrator explaining the race's background, even if the voice-over was done by a woman with a Russian accent. In a video about Turtle WoW from years ago, I'd seen newly created high elves simply get plopped down in Loch Modan with some starter quests around Farstrider Lodge. This was clearly outdated, as they now had their own starting zone called Thalssian Highlands, located north-west of the Plaguelands.

I will admit that after how much praise I'd seen heaped on the Turtle WoW devs for their custom content, I found it easy to immediately find things to nitpick. For example the first few quests I read were written in such incredibly purple prose, it actually made me laugh. (Though in fairness, later quests were not like that, so maybe the writers just thought that those particular characters should sound pompous and over the top.) More importantly though, the quest writers often seemed to forget that when you write quests for a game mode without quest tracking, you need to give some actual directions in the quest text. There were many occasions when this wasn't done and I was left slightly bewildered and confused after having been given instructions to kill some mobs without any idea of where to actually go.

It was difficult to find NPCs to repair my gear as most weapon and armour vendors didn't offer repairs like they would normally do in WoW. Guards seemed to be purely cosmetic and did absolutely no guarding. (My first death occurred when a higher-level mana wyrm attacked me on the road and a guard watched me die right next to him without offering any assistance.) Clickable quest items didn't despawn after I clicked them, so I often ended up clicking on them again without being able to loot anything, meaning I had to memorise which boxes or buckets I'd already interacted with.

The quest flow also seemed slightly off in general, as even though I picked up every quest I could find and killed plenty of mobs along the way, I was permanently slightly under-levelled for the next few quests I was given, and as a hunter without a pet... let's just say this was extremely painful and I died many times. (The issue was exacerbated by the all the mobs seemingly running too fast and having leashes that felt way too long for a starting zone - so any attempts to kite or simply run away from a fight were pretty much always unsuccessful as the mobs were impossible to outrun and would just chase me forever.)

Another thing that fascinated me about the quests in general was just how openly derivative many of them were, especially after the many comments I'd read about how Turtle WoW apparently understands better what defines Vanilla WoW than Blizzard does. "Come on," you might say, "it's kill-ten-rats kind of stuff, how much originality do you expect?" But I'm not talking about the tasks themselves - rather about the story and theming around them.

Every WoW starting zone has quests to kill some local wildlife, but the context varies. As a whole, each starting zone paints a picture of the culture your character belongs to, what its values are and what problems it faces. The blood elf starting zone is very different from the human starting zone, which is very different from the undead starting zone. What stood out to me about the high elf starting zone in Turtle WoW was that it seemed to lack a clear theme and felt more like some weird amalgamation of Elwynn Forest and Eversong Woods quests viewed through a fun house mirror: Here's the quest where some guy asks you to pick flowers for a girl he likes, here's the quest where an elf wants to throw a party and needs you to fetch supplies. Here's the quest with the vineyard where grapes have been abandoned in buckets and you need to fetch them. (Though oddly, no grapevines in sight - the implication seemed to be that they grow on the giant trees?)

All that just hit a nerve with me because I hate the idea that people might think that the gold standard for Classic+ should be to just retell the exact same stories over and over again. It's like those people who don't like anything Star Wars if it doesn't have a lost Skywalker finding the Force in it.

Anyway... that was a bit of tangent. Let's talk professions! I initially wanted to learn skinning and leatherworking, but the skinning trainer in town didn't seem to exist. I saw a jewelcrafting trainer nearby and went "Ooh, they have that here?", so I trained that and mining instead. In an interesting twist, it's not the same as Burning Crusade jewelcrafting. From what I've seen so far, the basic rings are present but have had their recipes changed, and there are a lot of new and different recipes as well.

Unfortunately, secondary professions seem to have gotten the short end of the stick in comparison, at least based on my experience in this zone. While there was a fishing trainer, the fishing skill requirement was way too high for a starter zone and fish were always getting away from me even with a lure applied. There were no fishing pools along the coast either. Cooking and first aid were likewise trainable in the vicinity, but none of the animals actually dropped meat that could be cooked, and apart from a handful of ghost mobs in the north-western corner of the map, nothing seemed to drop linen for first aid either.

I could go on and on... but despite these nitpicks and annoyances - I had fun. There was definitely something very refreshing and exciting about being in a vaguely Vanilla-like starting zone without having any idea of what awaited me. I loved not knowing what I'd see next whenever I crested a hill, or finding an unexpected quest giver inside a building. I quickly lost track of time while playing, and when I got up the next morning, I kept thinking about my little elf, eager to go back and play some more in a way I probably hadn't done since 2019's Classic launch.

For all the small details I noticed being off, there was still a lot to be impressed by, such as the fact that the whole zone of Thalassian Highlands is an original creation (even if it clearly recycles a lot of assets from Eversong), including the composition of original zone music. And there are other loving touches, such as that they updated the Vanilla loading screens for Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms to include high elves and goblins. The Turtle WoW creators clearly have a lot of love for Vanilla; there are just gaps in the details.

At one point when I got tired of dying constantly due to my low level, I ran towards what looked like the local docks on the map, and jumped onto the first boat that arrived to take me somewhere else, anywhere else. I ended up in Auberdine, and found that someone had pitched a tent outside the inn. I had heard about these, so I stood under it, and within the course of five minutes or so, I saw my rested XP shoot up by about half a level. While I soon hearthed back home, that restedness helped me to finally catch up a bit in levels, so thanks, anonymous tent-builder.

This seems like a good point to mention community. Again, this is something that I'd heard a lot of praise for before, so I was admittedly a bit confused when for my first few levels I couldn't get anyone to talk to me. By that I mean that people would group up for a quest and cooperate, but I would literally get zero reply to anything I said. I was starting to wonder whether there was some hidden chat restriction for low-level characters or something. I think I was around level 9 when a friendly mage finally talked to me while we briefly grouped up for a quest to kill murlocs. They even offered to continue questing together, but unfortunately I had to log off just after that. The only other verbal interaction I've had since then was some random whispering me to compliment me on my "thicc elf booty". All in all, I would rate that as similar to playing on a Blizzard PvE server before they merged everything into the mega servers - neither notably better nor worse. But then, you can't really have a non-megaserver experience in most of the official Classic versions anymore, so...

After I'd completed all the quests in Thalassian Highlands (as far as I could tell), I tried to do some research on what else might be interesting to check out, whether there was another custom zone I could go to at my level. As it turns out, there aren't actually as many of them as one might have expected after all the hype, and Thalassian Highlands is supposed to be one of the better ones. There do however seem to be a lot of smaller changes all over the place, and I have already encountered a few new quests sprinkled in here and there among the original ones from the existing zones.

I don't know how much time I will invest in this exploration (never mind how much I will have before the server potentially goes bye-bye) but there'll be at least one more post on the subject, about me trying to do my first dungeon and it being a very weird experience.

Could Turtle WoW Be a Catalyst for Classic+?

I was going to start my day doing something else today, but then I came across a hot bit of gossip late last night that I just had to write about first: that Blizzard is suing Turtle WoW. I'm sure I'm not the only one who immediately wondered whether this is going to be another Nostalrius situation.

But let's back up for a second for anyone who might be confused by what some or all of that means. To recap, Nostalrius was an incredibly popular Vanilla WoW private server that was active for a year from early 2015 to 2016. It purported to be not for profit and claimed to offer the most authentic recreation of Vanilla WoW out there. Despite its very short lifespan, it managed to attract an incredible amount of interest within that year, to the point that even mainstream media were starting to report on it. Blizzard eventually sent them a cease and desist, but also ended up inviting the developers over to their headquarters, and it's widely believed that the whole incident was what convinced Blizzard that there was a valid business case for them to release their own Classic servers, as they announced WoW Classic at BlizzCon the following year.

(I myself never played on the original Nostalrius, but I played on its direct competitor Kronos. Vanilla WoW was definitely "in the air" around that time, with the disappointing Warlords of Draenor making many yearn for the good old days.)

The initial release of WoW Classic took a sledgehammer to the private server scene, because most people were happy to just pay for easy access to the "real" thing. However, ten years later, things look a little different.

WoW Classic is still around of course, but it has evolved in ways that have once again started to put some people off. WillE just released a video the other day about how he thinks there are too many versions of Classic at the moment, and I've been thinking about writing my own take on the state of Classic for a while. Because while there are many versions of it, at the same time they haven't necessarily been what (at least some) people wanted. Players were given a chance to play Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, and then these expansions were taken away from them again, so if either of these was what you really wanted out of WoW Classic, it was back to private servers for you. Season of Discovery was off to an incredibly strong start with the promise of offering "Vanilla with a twist" and then lost steam hard in its subsequent phases, just to end up in an awkward state of abandonment now, with no more active development planned.

People keep clamouring for "Classic Plus", a version of Vanilla WoW that should be permanent and receive continued active development like retail, but stay true to Vanilla somehow, even though you won't be able to find two people who agree on what exactly that means. In fairness, Blizzard has sent out more than one survey seemingly trying to find out what such a version of WoW could look like, but personally I'm still not convinced that they are really working on a permanent Classic+ as opposed to just the next seasonal server.

Either way, the point is that there is once again a gap in Blizzard's offerings that private servers have been happy to fill, and one of the most popular of these has been Turtle WoW. Unlike Nostalrius, this one has been more of a slow burn. Their website proudly states that they've been online since 2018, but I didn't really start hearing about them until a few years ago. YouTuber McDoubles has a whole playlist about him exploring TurtleWoW that was widely viewed and whose first video was posted roughly three years ago.

I've never played Turtle WoW myself - I'm not necessarily happy with everything Blizzard has done, but I'm also less invested at this point than I was, and ease of access and stability are more important to me - but I read and heard a lot about it. In recent months in particular, I couldn't watch a YouTube video about WoW Classic without the comments being flooded with "go play Turtle WoW" style comments, similar to how people were shouting about Nostalrius everywhere in 2015.

I'm not sure Turtle has become as popular as Nost was back then, but considering how long it's been up, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd had several hundred thousand sign-ups by this point as well, and it's clear that Blizzard was getting fed up with them. Unlike Nostalrius, Turtle WoW also hasn't been afraid to make money with a cash shop, and the lawsuit alleges that they may have made millions of dollars from it.

I'm kind of conflicted in terms of how I feel about this whole thing. Legally, Blizzard is obviously in the right (as they were with Nostalrius), and Turtle WoW's big cash shop shows that they weren't nearly as selfless about this whole thing as the Nostalrius team was. However, reading through the lawsuit and seeing the sheer amount of international cooperation required to run Turtle (defendants are alleged to be located in Russia, Germany, the US, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Romania and the Czech Republic) I can't help but also feel the passion of the people involved, even if they were making money off their product.

And there is a reason Turtle WoW got as popular as it has, in that they managed to tap into what at least a significant part of the player base wants out of Classic and that Blizzard doesn't currently provide. Noteworthy to me has been:

1. Their focus has been on PvE (when all the big private servers used to be PvP), levelling and the world. Their website states that they added two new raids, but there are way more improvements and additions made to the open world and lower-level zones, such as additional boat connections and countless new quest hubs, new world events and a new profession. This is in contrast to how with Blizzard, everything always seems to circle back to raiding, endgame and adding even more powerful gear. This was the big letdown of Season of Discovery for me personally.

2. In a time when big companies are constantly outsourcing and reducing staff with "soft skills", such as social media or customer service teams, Turtle WoW had a reputation for having actual human GMs and good moderation. I even heard complaints that their moderation was "too strict", which to me to be honest sounded like a good thing in the context of MMO general chat channels.

This is not to say that Turtle WoW was perfect or anything - what I heard about their cash shop sounded quite off-putting to me (you could buy bags, "transmog" and garish mounts to an extent that puts retail WoW to shame), but to be honest I was still kind of glad the project was there as a signal to Blizzard that there are people who care about things they don't currently offer.

With this lawsuit, it seems unlikely that Turtle WoW will survive for very long - while it's not impossible for a for-profit private server to continue operating in the face of legal threats if they route all their activities through just the right countries (Warmane has infamously been in operation for over a decade), I'm not sure the Turtle WoW team has what it takes to continue evading the law, especially as the details of the lawsuit seem to show that the owners have already been identified and tracked down in real life.

I think the best we can hope for is that the situation will create sufficient amounts of attention and community outcry to make Blizzard think hard about what it is that's missing from Classic right now to the extent that hundreds of thousands of people would rather sign up for and download a private server client than play their product. 

Struggling to Enjoy the Journey in MoP Classic

As far as MMOs go, my attitude has long been one of enjoying the journey above all else. I've never really been able to relate to people who just want to get to "the end"/level cap/whatever and complain that everything along the way is boring and takes too long... until I played Classic Mists of Pandaria I guess.

It's not even that the quests are bad or anything. As I wrote last year while evaluating MoP Remix, aside from some specific plot threads, they were pretty decent overall. However, Remix is kind of the problem. I "just" did all of this content about a year ago, in an environment where everything was significantly sped up, it was easy to travel around with full flying enabled from the start, and killing mobs was a breeze. Re-doing the same quests while ground-bound and taking ten times longer to kill anything doesn't feel nostalgic to me right now, it just feels tedious.

I've been trying to "ease the pain" by picking and choosing my quest hubs so that I could focus on the ones I liked best, but it's still just so. Slow. At level 86 I pushed forward to the Valley of the Four Winds and did the majority of the quests there since I remembered quite liking them (plus there were a lot of animals to skin for my leatherworking), but since then it's been nothing but a drag.

I started running random dungeons on the side but they don't actually give that much XP - which I suppose is a good thing in some ways, as I noticed that people actually kill all the bosses and let others complete their quests, seeing how those things actually contribute significantly to your XP gains. (This is a contrast to retail, where people will skip absolutely everything just to get to the end as soon as possible and get the completion reward.)

In general, those dungeons were a bit of a weird experience initially, since my brain doesn't quite know whether to file them under Classic or retail. The way people tend to pull entire rooms in one go is certainly more retail-like, but then I was actually kind of surprised when I got my first pop-up to roll for loot, since I had expected everything to be personal loot already. I even had the option to roll need on items I couldn't even use, so I was briefly startled that I actually had to pay proper attention to which button to press. That's not meant to be a complaint; it just goes to illustrate that my brain seems to have different "modes" for Classic and retail, and MoP doesn't really fit either one at the moment.

I'm currently about halfway through level 88 and it feels like I still have an eternity to go. I did actually go ahead and do the quest to open the Vale of Eternal Blossoms early, but I soon ran into a "you're not seasoned enough to help us yet, come back later" wall, so I'll save that for another post.

On the plus side, after my initial reservations about MoP gameplay changes, such as the loss of my melee weapon or the new talents, the way hunter plays has actually turned out to be pretty fun, though I'd say the rotation is starting to veer into slightly too many buttons for my liking (Cata seemed close to perfect, while now there are pretty much always one or two that I forget to press regularly). However, the fact that they actually gave hunters full non-combat stealth with Camouflage in this expansion is wild to me and super handy for many quests (though it's also so alien that I sometimes still forget that I have it). 

Also, the farm! The farm and professions were not part of Remix, so I've been enjoying growing a few vegetables every day and working on my cooking again. It's just a shame that you can't unlock the full farm plot until max-level, adding yet another item to taunt me from the finish line if only I could get there sooner. I just need to knuckle down and grind out those last one and a half levels over a weekend some time, but WoW has just never felt slower to me.

The Midnight Expansion Reveal

I'm glad I didn't try to watch the Midnight expansion reveal live, because from the sounds of it they abused WoW's popularity to the maximum possible extent this time - which is to say, they knew that people were primarily watching for WoW, so they crammed in two hours of Call of Duty ads and the like beforehand to keep everyone online.

I did hop over to the official WoW YouTube channel later to watch the announcement videos and... huh.

Back when the Worldsoul Saga was first announced, I wrote the following: "I applaud their long-term thinking for planning the next three expansions in advance, but to be honest I'm not sure it was a good idea to reveal all this to the public, as by doing so, they've basically spoiled their big BlizzCon reveals for the next several years."

I think the Midnight reveal has proved my theory correct in so far as I've never seen so many people react with a kind of "meh" attitude to a new expansion announcement. There are always those who'll love it no matter what and will be hyped, and there'll always be those who hate everything Blizzard does no matter what. But those in the middle can be swayed either way, and I've never seen this much apathy from the masses before.

There are probably a number of different reasons for that, but I reckon the fact that everyone already knew roughly what was coming must have been a major contributor. "It's gonna be about the void and about elves, something something Silvermoon." So when the trailer showed us elves fighting to defend Silvermoon against the void, that was at best exactly what everyone expected, and at worst a bit of a let-down in the sense that people wanted more (as MMO players always do the moment you tell them about anything).

There was something else about the trailer though. I liked it well enough, but something felt ever so slightly "off".

At first, I thought it was just the fact that Liadrin had been given a new haircut. Seriously, the first thing I did after watching the cinematic for the first time was google pictures of Liadrin's current player model, because I kept thinking "She didn't always have a tight braid, did she?" - and no, she did indeed not; they are giving her a new haircut for Midnight which will be reflected on her in-game model as well.

However, when looking around to find out whether anyone else had the same reaction, I actually found a lot of complaints about the trailer's visuals, which I believe is a first. In the past, even if players hated a trailer for what it conveyed, it was pretty much universally agreed that it was still impeccably animated at least. Not with this one! I don't think all the criticisms are necessarily equally valid, but let's just say that after people pointed out that Liadrin in this looks more like the Elven Hero from Elder Scrolls Online or Tauriel from the Hobbit movies than a Warcraft elf, I haven't been able to unsee that.

After comparing to the Battle for Azeroth trailer (which does feature a similar situation including a city siege), I also found it noticeable how many unique characters were featured in the BfA cinematic - while Sylvanas and Anduin are the focus, we also get shots of Saurfang, Zekhan and Greymane, as well as a number of different "generic units", from undead archers to dwarven riflemen. In the Midnight trailer, we have exactly three focus characters and everyone else is an indistinguishable melee soldier covered from head to toe in armour like they are a bunch of stormtroopers, which I hadn't really picked out before.

I think the biggest thing though is that the pacing/scripting feels slightly off and fails to reach a proper climax. I'd say it's fine for most of the cinematic actually, but when Liadrin returns with the help from the Sunwell it ends too quickly without letting us fully feel the triumph, while also just getting plain confusing because the help are also just a bunch of armoured mooks. I've looked around online and even the most passionate lore nerds are unsure of who these are actually supposed to be (though there are seemingly a million theories, from Guardians of the Ancient Kings to the Army of Light to the Arathi to representations of us, the players).

The gameplay reveals suffered from a similar mix of "well, we knew that was coming" and muddled messaging. Yes, housing is a big deal, but we've known about that for almost a year, and there's been a constant drip-feed of more details since then. You can't expect people to suddenly gasp and be super-excited about hearing the exact same thing again.

I also used to think it was kind of funny how they'd include things like "level cap increase" or "new dungeons" as major expansion features to be excited about, but this time they didn't and it was actually kind of confusing. I saw people ask questions like "Will there actually be a level increase this time?" (yes) and only later found out all kinds of interesting stuff that they didn't actually put into the features trailer, such as that Valeera Sanguinar will be the new delve companion or the major changes coming to transmog (huge!).

My personal takeaway is simply that Midnight will continue the War Within, which was kind of what we knew was going to happen. I'll be happy to buy it because I'm enjoying my time in retail right now, but I'm not sure it really delivered in the hype department the way these expansion announcements are usually expected to.

K'aresh and the Story of the War Within

Patch 11.2 arrived about one and a half weeks ago, and with it the final major story update for the War Within. That still feels weird to think about, considering the Midnight expansion announcement is still a few days away. I mean, we know that there'll be plenty of content to tide us over until 12.0, from Legion Remix to the release of housing, but it still seems odd for the War Within to just kind of end where we are now.

K'aresh is a nice enough zone. It recycles the city of Tazavesh from Shadowlands, which I don't have any particularly strong feelings about as I only ever did the associated dungeon one or two times. The wider zone with its purple tinge, floating rocks and eco-domes is strongly inspired by Netherstorm, which makes sense and is another thing I'm quite happy with. The large areas of desert and packs of devourer mobs also recall Shadowlands and Zereth Mortis for me, and look, I know everyone loves to hate on Shadowlands but Zereth Mortis was a great zone and I don't mind being reminded of it either.

I also liked the storyline well enough (I have yet to kill Dimensius and see what comes afterwards). I wasn't a fan of Xal'atath constantly crooning at me that I was her champion (though this meme on reddit made me chuckle) but the return of Ve'nari's sass gave me life and was good for some genuine laughs. (When she ended that one quest with "Now get some stygia... I joke.") However, I'm also left with a certain feeling of "Why are we here?".

I'm not saying there's no connection at all between the War Within's patches, obviously Alleria chasing Xal'atath has been a through line. But should it have been? The hook at the start of this expansion was that Thrall, Anduin and other important characters were hearing the call of Azeroth's world soul, and that something was seemingly wrong down there. We descended deep into the earth, learned about the earthen and world soul "shards" like Beledar. We met the Haranir, who also seemed to have a connection to Azeroth itself and were worried about corrupting influences. Undermine was admittedly always going to be a bit of a mid-expansion side quest, but it wasn't so far off that we couldn't have pivoted back to focusing on the world soul after that. Dataminers have reported that there was a planned zone called the "Rootlands", presumably under Azj-Kahet, which would have made sense as a final destination for us to find out just what is going on inside Azeroth.

However, instead we chased Xal'atath to K'aresh because suddenly it's all about the return of Dimensius the All-Devouring and the call of Azeroth's world soul seems all but forgotten. Now, considering that War Within and the next two expansions are meant to form "The Worldsoul Saga", we're probably not all done with world soul business, and I really hope that we'll get back to it - but right now, this doesn't feel like the first part of a trilogy but rather like something that was meant to be a stand-alone expansion and was cut off at the knees at the last moment to pivot towards a completely different plot.

Now, this does kind of mesh with how Chris Metzen said that large chunks of War Within were already done when he rejoined the team and had to be somewhat retooled to fit the new Worldsoul Saga narrative. He also indicated that he almost expected people to possibly feel a bit unsatisfied with War Within on its own, while promising that it would all pay off later.

I really, really hope that he is right, because at the moment I can't say that I'm really sold on this story. It's one thing for part one of a trilogy to have a bit of an open ending hinting at bigger thing to come. At the end of Fellowship of the Ring, we know that we're not done, but we do know where we're going and have been witness to some pretty exciting adventures relating to that.

The War Within has not given me that vibe. I know that the next expansion will be about elves and the void only because Chris Metzen said so, not because the War Within has really built either of those subjects up to be a major theme (until the sudden pivot with this patch that is). It's just been very focused on Alleria and Xal'atath as characters, and to be honest I kind of feel like that's been a mistake. You may blame part of that on my general dislike of Xal'atath, but I have no issues with Alleria - it's just that I don't think you can place something like a WoW expansion on the shoulders of two NPCs. Their personal struggles can be part of the larger story, sure, but I don't think they're strong enough to form the framework that's supposed to hold everything up.

I enjoy hearing tales about the adventures of different denizens of Azeroth - I did so in Vanilla too; and I'm fine with the additional bells and whistles of voice acting and cut scenes. But in my opinion at least, WoW is at its strongest when the focus remains on the big picture and the world as a whole instead of one specific character's journey, and I'm just not seeing that right now. People have ragged on Dragonflight's story a lot, but even if you want to make fun of Alexstrasza being kind of useless and other NPCs being flat in their characterisation, it was all extremely cohesive thematically, focused on the Dragon Isles, the dragon flights, the primalists and all their minions and allies, which made it easy for me to overlook the flaws in individual storylines.

War Within on the other hand reminds me strongly of BfA, which started off with this strong Alliance vs. Horde theme, including a very personal and powerful narrative for Jaina, but then we were suddenly spending our time on mechagnome island and under the sea, and next it was all about uniting to fight old gods and wait, what? Metzen may have big plans for the Worldsoul Saga, but I don't think it bodes well that the way he decided to build the first part of this trilogy is superficially indistinguishable from an expansion where the story just felt non-cohesive and random at times. We'll see what we'll learn from the Midnight expansion announcement next week.

Season 2 Roundup

With War Within's next/last(?) major patch coming out this week, I wanted to take a moment to look back at some of the things I've been busy with over the last couple of months.

I already talked about how I achieved my goal of beating the Underpin on ?? difficulty, but I also did a lot of delves in general. It's kind of funny how hard I've come around on this feature after really disliking it at the start of the expansion. I wasn't particularly interested in the special "delve belt" they added towards the end of the season and the new overcharged delve type, but as it turns out I ended up maxing out all its traits in no time anyway, simply due to just how many delves I was constantly running on alts.

Not really tied to the season, but I also got my "Algari Master of All" achievement the other week - jewelcrafting was the last profession on which I hadn't hit 100 yet. Mind you, the real progress nowadays is in the profession knowledge, and on that front I've only maxed out mining and enchanting so far. Still, somehow that's less important to me and the achievement was still something I was very proud of.

Back in June I wrote about how I wasn't all that interested in the revamped Horrific Visions, but I actually ended up becoming more invested once I took some time to fully understand how they worked (instead of simply letting my husband herd me through them while constantly being yelled at about how I was standing in the wrong place or pulling the wrong mobs). I liked learning about all the hidden mounts and achievements and ended up earning most of them.

For a little while I was worried that the Revisited Horrific Visions were going to go away as well at the end of the season (because with how many things are temporary nowadays, it can be hard to tell) and started grinding them like crazy, but then I learned that they should hang around and eased up on that again. I got up to full completion with six masks, and I think I managed three districts with seven, but that was already quite stressful and I figured there was no way I was going to be able to add the eighth mask for 400% additional sanity damage without putting a lot more work into it than I was willing to invest, so I gave up at that point.

Throughout the month of July in specific, there were also two more temporary events, the Greedy Emissary event and the Collector's Bounty event.

The former was a promotional Diablo crossover, which is something that I'm vaguely aware has happened before and that I never could get myself to care about, but this time I was really intrigued by the recoloured armour sets from the anniversary celebration. Then my husband started grinding shards for them and for some reason I got weirdly competitive about the whole thing (I can't let him have all the mogs before I get them! Or something.) and did the same, and in the end I'd collected all the rewards except one of the rare drop transmogs. It ended up being surprisingly fun.

Finally, there was Collector's Bounty, an event that was slightly controversial in the way almost everything the devs do is nowadays: for the month of July only, loot drops in old raids were doubled (or even tripled?), and rare, coveted items such as legendary weapons or ultra-rare mounts had their drop rate increased by 5% each - which may not sound like much, but when the base drop chance was a lot lower than that to begin with, it was still a significant increase.

I mostly thought this was interesting in so far as I don't recall Blizzard ever having any kind of event for the collectors in their audience before, even though it's widely known that this is something a lot of people engage in. I'm even one of them, but a lot more half-hearted than most others I saw talking about the subject.

For example I watched a guildie of mine literally spend his whole Saturday afternoon cycle every single one of his alts through Eye of Eternity in pursuit of the drake mounts from there, and on social media I saw similar comments about how people were taking dozens of characters through old dungeons and raids every day in an attempt to maximise their odds. Personally, I did a few more runs of this type than I would usually do (which added up to maybe half a dozen old raid clears in total during a given week) but I couldn't muster anything close to the same level of enthusiasm.

The one thing I really would've cared about, getting the second Thunderfury binding on my warrior, didn't happen, and I didn't really do enough other raids and dungeons to significantly increase my odds. Aside from some "bonus transmog", my ultimate haul consisted only of one Warglaive of Azzinoth from Black Temple and the panther mount from the Cata version of ZG.

Oh, and I got the Deathcharger's Reins from Stratholme, though that was more of a bizarre accident than anything - you see, Blizzard claimed that timewalking dungeons weren't affected by the Collector's Bounty buff, but that didn't seem to be true. The drop happened during a Strat timewalking run, and not only did the recipient already have it, another person in the group also did and also claimed that they'd already seen it drop three times that week. The person who looted the mount and couldn't use it asked if anyone was willing to bid gold for it (something I'm not a fan of personally, if you're gonna give stuff away just let people roll for it in my opinion), so I jokingly bid 100 gold and ended up "winning" it! That sure felt strange, but I'm certainly not going to complain.

One thing I will say for the event though is that it really made me think about the meaning of travel in WoW again. I saw someone comment that they liked how the buff "brought people out into the world again" and my first thought was that this sounded ridiculous, seeing how the whole point of it was to farm for drops inside instances. But as I started travelling to different locations myself, I realised what that person had meant: many of these destinations were not exactly linked up to super-convenient portals, so there was sometimes a fair bit of travel involved, and you would indeed notice other people around you as you approached the instance portal, whether they were also just arriving or sitting on their vendor mount outside to clear out their bags.

For me personally, it was a bit of a reminder of why travel in WoW was such an important part of Classic and can still make a difference to your experience in retail too. You see, I was also going to fly to the Eye of Eternity for a quick clear when I flew over Wintergrasp and saw that it was about to start. Not having done Wintergrasp in ages, I thought it would be fun to join it for a lark just to see how much I remembered and how much I could do by myself as a max-level character. The surprising answer to the second question was: not as much as I would've expected, as everything was actually scaled to 80.

However, now I was intrigued and actually ended up coming back for the next battle, to see whether I could do better with a bit of prep. The answer was yes, but I still couldn't quite reach the central keep by myself (Horde seemed to be permanently in possession of the fortress, meaning all I could do as Alliance was attack). I told my husband about this and asked him whether he wanted to come along so we could see whether we'd do better with two, and he was up for it! We did indeed make some more progress, but still came up short once again (the fact that a Horde player was actually going around taking down all the towers to shorten the battle that time didn't help). After a little more research and planning we finally managed to conquer the fortress with the two of us in our fourth battle. It was silly and pointless but an incredibly fun little adventure, and I never even would've thought of it if I hadn't flown over Wintergrasp at just the right time on my way to the Eye of Eternity. Which is a weird thing to take away from Collector's Bounty I guess, but it did remind me of the sorts of random adventures that I always used to love best about WoW.

Setting Foot into Classic Pandaria

It's funny that for all the preparation I did for my "Project Vale of Eternal Blossoms", I then ended up completely forgetting about the actual launch of MoP Classic. A former guildie who had noticed me being active again during Cata actually messaged me last week to ask whether I was still playing and I said I was taking a bit of a break until the actual MoP Classic release, to which his response was "it released yesterday I think" and I was like "oops".

It was no problem of course, as I'd wanted to avoid the launch day crowds anyway, but I still thought it was funny. When I did eventually log in, my first order of business was not to go to Pandaria but to level my archaeology. I'd had a bit of fun with it at the end of Cata already, but archaeology is one area where MoP made huge improvements, both by making surveying give skill-ups and XP for longer and by literally doubling the yield of each dig site. I breezed through the different tiers in what felt like no time at all, with Outland and Northrend barely being more than pit stops, and gained about half a level from the whole endeavour.

At one point I also ended up making a detour to Tol Barad, for no other reason than that I happened to walk past the portal and suddenly remembered that I quite liked the place back in the day. However, I did a round of dailies and it didn't really tickle my nostalgia. I also queued up for a Tol Barad battle when the time for it came around, and I don't know whether that's a bug or what, but the map wasn't actually showing who owned what, which was very confusing for a game mode where you're supposed to fight and hold specific nodes. Whenever I got into a skirmish I got my squishy level 85 ass kicked hard by people three or four levels higher than me so I eventually just semi-AFKed in one of the bases. We still won, based on the final scoreboard probably because the Alliance had twice as many players as the Horde.

Eventually I decided that it was probably time to at least get started on Pandaria and began the intro scenario. Just as I resigned myself to having to machine-gun down orcs from a helicopter again, I clicked on the chopper and... the quest just auto-completed without me having to do anything. I laughed out loud because it just seemed too bizarre that literally the very first quest in Pandaria would be bugged. Looking at the Wowhead comments, it sounds like this weird skip may actually be intentional, though I have no clue why.

I made my way to Paw'don Village and was surprised to find that things were somewhat different than I remembered them from Remix. In Remix, they'd designated the main storyline quests with shield markers like they've done in retail since Shadowlands, and everything else seemed to be pretty openly available to do in whatever order you liked, which did seem to align with my memories of Pandaria feeling much less restrictive in terms of quest progression than Cataclysm had been.

However, it seems that my memory in that area is clearly faulty, because once in Paw'don I had exactly three quests available to go to the orchard to the north-west (which I remembered being an optional side hub in Remix) and nothing else. I decided to ride around a bit to see whether I could pick up a different quest line anywhere else, but found very little (not nothing, but something like three other exclamation marks in all of Jade Forest). So there was clearly still a lot more pressure to do things in the exact order prescribed by Blizzard than I remember.

Still, I didn't feel like continuing to quest just then, so I just explored a bit and did a bit of pandaren archaeology on the way. I ran into a rare mob and decided to try fighting it. Considering that my gear was pretty bad I didn't expect to get very far, but it did nominally show as being the same level as me so I thought it was worth a shot. I laughed out loud when its first attack literally one-shot me.

I ventured forth into the Valley of the Four Winds and saw that Chen Stormstout had a grey exclamation mark over his head, so there was no skipping ahead either, or at least not until I levelled up. At least the cooking quests in Halfhill were available, so I made a start on those.

I'm still not entirely sure what my plan is going to be - my goal is of course to explore the Vale of Eternal Blossoms in its original pristine glory, and while I could probably get there already, it's a max-level zone and I'd probably not have a very good time, so it seems sensible to do a bit of questing and levelling in the other zones first, even if I don't particularly care about that part.